So. Here I am again, with another attempt to kickstart this blog back to life.
It's not the first time that I've tried to come back. The blog has been more or less inactive since early 2012, and 2011 wasn't my most productive year either. I made a brief stab at turning this into a Fighting Fantasy blog last year, but that fell by the wayside. It seems that I'm just unable to muster any enthusiasm for it.
I don't really know why that is. D&D had been one of my regular obsessions since the late 1980s, something I loved deeply and was always ready to play or discuss. Then, somewhere after the announcement of 5th edition, it lost its hold on me. I still love fantasy, and to be honest I still love D&D. But it doesn't dominate my thoughts in the way that it used to, and as a result the blog fell into disuse.
Even so, it nags at the back of my mind. I want to post. One of the reasons that I started this project was that I wanted to read every D&D product ever (or at least those made by TSR). The Ultimate Sandbox was a way for me to do that, and also have some fun with it along the way. I enjoyed piecing together the early years of the game's history, and drawing connections between disparate bits of lore and arcane rules.
I think perhaps it fell apart when I hit the AD&D Monster Manual. It's a book I love to read, but blogging about it grew difficult. It's mostly a compilation of monsters that had already appeared in earlier products, and in a lot of cases there weren't many changes to highlight or things to discuss. It's also long; I was much more engaged with this project when I was plowing through the shorter supplements and issues of Dragon.
The thing is, I'm close to the end. My last post (Part 44!) covered Sea Hags, Sea Horses, Sea Lions and Shadows; by my count that leaves me with 48 monsters to go. I'd previously covered about 175 monsters, some I'm more than three-quarters done.
I hate leaving things unfinished, so here is what I plan to do. Forget the Fighting Fantasy stuff; I've kicked that over to another blog. At the very least, I'm going to slog my way through the Monster Manual. Once that's done, I'll assess whether I want to continue. The answer will probably be yes, because I really want to read all of this stuff. And if I'm reading it, I might as well be posting about it.
I expect that I'll make my next update within the next week or so, and I plan to post at least once a week from there on. It won't be the most frequent schedule, but I figure that even slow progress is some progress. See you in several days time for AD&D Monster Manual: Part 45. (I hope.)
